I hated the New Blockaders experience at ATP, the volume and the extreme frequencies, but what I heard of that CD I found totally different and would like to hear more of. I'm trying to stop accumulating CDs at the moment, especially ones that I don't really know if I'll like long-term, but I'm hoping that if I wait a while I'll be able to find it as a digital download somewhere, and then I'll almost definitely buy it.

The final live document to come from this legendary UK noise group is drawn from the most amazing TNB live action of their career, their massively psychedelic set from ATP's Nightmare Before Christmas curated by Thurston Moore. There were a ton of amazing performances over that weekend: Stooges, The Bummer Road, Wooden Wand, NNCK... but TNB pretty much ruled the weekend. Rumour has it that the line-up included Damion Romero, Has and Ben from Jazzfinger and Mark from Putrefier with Richard Rupenus conducting things via ESP from the sidelines but as with everything relating to the whole TNB mythos, facts are impossible to verify. The set was quite unlike anything they've ever really done before and hearing it again in this form, beautifully recorded and mastered by Romero, the amount of hallucinogenic detail and the intricate violence of the performance is even more apparent. It starts off with sudden blurts of extremely tactile lightning strikes before a bunch of voices cohere in a low fog of disruptive tone, building with shrieks and starts to the point where it becomes a huge opaque wall of vibrating tone threat. But what really sets it off - and what makes the whole thing sound so impossibly malevolent - is the evocative use of a highly vocal/vocoder sounding synth pattern that occasionally rises to the surface in waves of genuinely disturbing claustrophobic threat. At the time I was sure it was a modulated vocal but here the way it is subtly threaded throughout the performance like the most under-stated theme makes it sound more like a synth mutated to the point of electro-hypnotism. Certainly the most psychedelic noise record of TNB's career, if not the best of their live actions, Das Zerstoren, Zum Gebaren is already one of my all-time favourite noise releases. Highest possible recommendation. Edition of 1000 copies in full-colour digipak with sleevenotes by Byron Coley.